--- title: "New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018 · AI Fault Line" url: https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-1093-qje-qjae008/ description: "AI Fault Line is a neutral, evidence-cited field guide to why experts looking at the same developments disagree about AI's effect on productivity, jobs, inequality, regulation and the pace of change." --- [Research](https://aifaultline.com/research/) # New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018 [David Autor](https://aifaultline.com/authors/david-autor/), Caroline Chin, [Anna Salomons](https://aifaultline.com/authors/anna-salomons/), [Bryan Seegmiller](https://aifaultline.com/authors/bryan-seegmiller/) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 15 Mar 2024 [Read original source](https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae008) Where this sits in the debate - [Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates?](https://aifaultline.com/debate/jobs/) · its finding: it depends ([why studies differ](https://aifaultline.com/debate/jobs/#why)) Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model ([AI-written](https://aifaultline.com/about/)). ## Abstract Abstract We answer three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories (“new work”) in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work, where does it come from, and what effect does it have on labor demand? We construct a novel database spanning eight decades of new job titles linked to U.S. Census microdata and to patent-based measures of occupations’ exposure to labor-augmenting and labor-automating innovations. The majority of current employment is in new job specialties introduced since 1940, but the locus of new-work creation has shifted from middle-paid production and clerical occupations over 1940–1980 to high-paid professional occupations and secondarily to low-paid services since 1980. New work emerges in response to technological innovations that complement the outputs of occupations and demand shocks that raise occupational demand. Innovations that automate tasks or reduce occupational demand slow new-work emergence. Although the flow of augmentation and automation innovations is positively correlated across occupations, the former boosts occupational labor demand while the latter depresses it. The demand-eroding effects of automation innovations have intensified in the past four decades while the demand-increasing effects of augmentation innovations have not. ## About this publication **Top journal.** One of the journals economics departments rank highest: the “top five” economics journals, and the general-science journals Science and Nature. Placed by: Top five economics journals. [How sources are ranked](https://aifaultline.com/about/#source-ranking). Published 2024 (32 months ago) Citations 182 (OpenAlex) ## Citations in context [Chart: 182 citations, cohort median 47] 182 citations — 91st percentile among the 23 indexed papers from 2024 in this collection. Citation counts favor older papers; this compares only same-year papers here, not the whole literature. [Chart: published 2024] □ added to this collection in 2026. Anna Salomons, Bryan Seegmiller, David Autor signed the wemustactnow.ai letter · author affiliation matches seed institutions massachusetts institute of technology, northwestern university — part of why this paper is in the collection. ## Cited elsewhere in this guide - [State of the debate: Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates?](https://aifaultline.com/debate/jobs/) ## More on this topic Related by theme, not necessarily by method or conclusion. - [The Effects of Generative AI on High Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-2139-ssrn-4945566/) SSRN · 2024 - [GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-48550-arxiv-2303-10130/) arXiv · 2023 - [Extending “GPTs Are GPTs” to Firms](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-1257-pandp-20251045/) AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2025 - [What Makes New Work Different from More Work?](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-1146-annurev-economics-092325-041649/) Annual Review of Economics · 2026 Overview assembled automatically from collected metadata. [How this site is built](https://aifaultline.com/about/).